Two facts about black and white people in the United States give rise to a number of important moral questions. This book attempts to answer five of them. The two facts are that for much of our nation’s history, black people as a group were treated worse than were white people as a group and that by many uncontroversial measures of human well-being, black Americans on average aren’t doing as well today as white Americans are doing. The five moral questions that arise from these facts, and that constitute the subject of this book, concern the moral status of slave reparations, affirmative action, hate speech restrictions, hate crime laws, and racial profiling.

One way to respond to these five practices would be to focus on something they all have in common. All five practices involve treating racial distinctions, in one way or another, as morally relevant. Someone might claim that racial distinctions should never be treated as morally relevant, and so oppose all five practices. Or someone might claim that racial distinctions may always be treated as morally relevant, and so think that there’s nothing wrong in principle with any of them.